Listening Journal 06-13

Disclosure - Settle - Where a record like DJ Koze’s Amygdala is almost innately tied to questions of ‘crossover’ between the genre worlds, this thing makes one hell of an argument that none of it matters in the first place. Songs are concise (don’t waste my time letting the beat build just to stroke your ego!), melodic, and detailed from every angle. I mean, the longest track here, “Defeated No More,” is only six minutes and it’s freaking gorgeous. The whole album is littered with those 90s style chromatic synth hooks that destabilize the house/techno beats just enough to pull your ears upward and imbue the proceedings with an air of deep blue jazz cool. It’s smart but not brainy, pop but not pandering, sexy but not dirty, and bittersweet without ever dipping into melodrama. There are songs that will be hits on the first half—“F For You,” “White Noise,” “When a Fire Starts to Burn”—and songs for people who wanna keep their heads down on the dance floor on the back end. And, really, there’s not much difference between them. Disclosure give precise care and attention to every corner of their sound and they make it look as natural as breathing. [8]

Camera Obscura - Desire Lines - I always tended to prefer Underachievers and Let’s Get Out of This Country over My Maudlin Career. The big orchestra was a bit much for me. So yeah, this record is much more up my particular alley, with its muted, mopey wash ornamented by some really tasteful lead guitar. It does tip Campbell’s hand a little—her melodic range feels especially narrow here—but the full band arrangements have a way of dialing down your expectations too. The songs feel less grand, but they carry less of a need for grandness too. “New Year’s Resolution,” “William’s Heart,” and “Fifth in Line to The Throne” are quick favorites, and I can’t help but hear “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” in the echoes of the guitar on “I Missed Your Party.” Definitely a Camera Obscura fan’s Camera Obscura album. [7]

The Lonely Island - The Wack Album - The whole premise has always been to poke fun at and pay tribute to all the hip-hop tropes these guys love, but on this album they pull fewer punches. All the best tracks here—“Go Kindergarten,” “YOLO,” “Semicolon,” “Spring Break Anthem,” “We Are a Crowd,”—go after their non-comedic inspirations just a little more directly than previous Lonely Island ‘hits.’ It turns out about as well (sometimes better) than everything else they’ve done: more jokes work than don’t, and a handful of the hooks are sticky enough to make you forget you’re listening to a comedy album. LOLz. [7]

    • (Speaking of History as a Costume)

    onemanbandstand’s reblog from my last post, in which he quotes an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay that remembers a lot of madness/murder/suicide during the supposedly fabulous jazz age, reminded me of something…

    I’ve been increasingly fascinated by New York in the 70s (and very early 80s). That particular era has always held a lot of interest for me across the board—culturally, aesthetically, historically, etc.—but there’s something extra compelling about the idea of NYC being at its lowest point: bankrupt, seedy, dangerous, decaying, almost apocalyptic. It’s the kind of place that, had I been alive back then, I would probably have stayed several hundred miles away from it. I only get to enjoy and be interested in it because I have the fantastic privilege of being born far away from the actual, hard struggle of many peoples’ lives in that time and place, and I’m not unaware of the ugliness of my own distanced, touristy fascination.

    Anyway, I read something the other day about how there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that one of the big contributing factors to high crimes rates (especially violent crimes) in 70s was lead poisoning from fuel emissions. Up until about 1975, when catalytic converters and unleaded gasoline became a new standard for most automobiles, lead emissions had increased steadily for decades, and chronic lead poisoning is linked to aggressive behavior, depression, short-term memory loss, and even ADHD. So now you can imagine not just a city in financial decay, but a population drugged and poisoned into a crazed stupor by their own cars. For all the notable and infamous hallmarks of NYC in the 70s—from the Son of Sam to CBGB to Serpico to Mark David Chapman to the Apology Line to Taxi Driver—what if it was all just the fumes?

    (Obviously there’s more to the history than that, but geez-louise…)

    JAKE CLELAND: A funny thing is the kinda-adage about folks thinking the best bands...

    jakec:

    A funny thing is the kinda-adage about folks thinking the best bands of all time coincided with the final stages of their formative years and yet if you listen to like 90% of the new music I’ve heard lately it seems they really think the best bands of all time were those behind the 80s pop hits we heard on the radio and saw on TV growing up in the early 90s.

    Another thing is how growing up, 60s and 70s rock just seemed like the sound of music but listening to it now it all takes on an almost cinematic quality, I guess because it used to be the records your parents listened to whereas now it’s the records made cool by the nostalgic swamp of mid-late 20th century romanticism we’ve (I’ve) been bathing in since our (my) aforementioned formative years. I don’t think we’re stupid enough to really want to live then but it’s fun to pretend.

    “This dream is drugging us all. Spiced-up, quick-cut docu-dramas like 24 Hour Party People and The Filth and the Fury reduce years—decades—of Friday nights at home, missed trains, bad drugs, breakups, bullshit bands, “State of the Nation”, the Professionals, Chequered Past, Revenge, Yes Please!, and eight-hundred thousand other hideous, embarrassing, myth-busting fuck-ups into one grand story, replete with an aching, dolorous sigh when it’s all over.”

    - Chris Ott, “On Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette”

    Not that any of this music is really about nostalgia, but I think about this passage a lot.

    “I don’t think we’re stupid enough to really want to live then but it’s fun to pretend.”

    The past is a costume, y’know? Party fodder. That’s why most people don’t worry about all the ways we get it wrong—a huge Ott Topic—or lose much sleep over the downsides of the obsession (poor Simon Reynolds…). As the song implies, you can’t be nostalgic for an unremembered 80s. That’s not nostalgia, it’s costumery, and only people who lived through it the first time mistake it for anything else. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with costumes, neither. Part of the fun of dressing up is getting to let the outfit change your demeanor, to unveil your secret wishes to be the kind of person who looks this way. Sure, one of the reasons I resent Mad Men or any sort of Gatsby/flapper-20s stuff is the pretending gets out of hand and people forget what they’re really glorifying. At some point, you just lose track of all your ‘normal’ clothes and then all you’ve got left to wear are costumes and bathing suits. It’s a lot harder to dig down to the historical truth in music, though, so shouldn’t we just delete every ‘Year’ tag from our mp3s and say everything’s fair game? Or did I miss the memo and everyone else has already done that?

    The Cleaners from Venus
    “A Fool Like You”
    In the Golden Autumn (1983)

    Y’know it rained all summer…

    This is all I’ve listened to for the last three days or so, the album and especially this song. One of the big background ideas of this stuff is the huge economic recession in England in the late 70s and early 80s, which is sometimes addressed directly (“Krugerrand Gladiators,” “Victorian Society”) but more often than not appears as an intangible pall, a sense of decay, loss, and helplessness. I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly how they do it. Do I know about the historical background because I read about it, or because I can sense it in the music?

    This is an infectious song, for one thing. It pokes fun at chintzy, Vegas-lounge style jazzanova through the lens of 60s psych pop, but is itself too cheap and shambolic to be an effective skewer. I don’t hear bile, I hear nostalgia and childlike playacting, especially in all the extraneous room chatter as the song winds down at the end. But there’s a certain wildness and desperation in the laughter too. The thinner cassette sound and the harshness of the reverb have a lot to do with it (think Women’s first album), telling us the people who made it either couldn’t have afforded or were just disillusioned with the luxury of a fancy studio without spelling it out. The glassy guitar tone is very 80s, but the wobbly, out of tune piano sounds like a relic, its descending 7th chords mirroring its own decay (check how they pull the same trick on “The Autumn Cornfield”).

    The song has a distinctly British way of refracting the cultural history it works from, like The Kinks adapting music hall tunes or Scott Walker turning kitchen sink dramas into gothic pop songs. Americans don’t really do it like this. I have to wonder, again, if I’m just projecting Margaret Thatcher, bleak weather, post punk, and Metroland, or if that’s exactly what Martin Newell wants me to hear in this gorgeous, bittersweet song.

    • Source: Spotify

    And my newest review is up at Pitchfork, of the new Cleaners From Venus reissue boxset

    Been listening to these albums all morning and they are lovely.

    Standing in a packed crowd at Glasslands last night with a Rolling Rock and a rapidly-developing grudge against the shoulder-bumping dude to our right, I was thankful for the air conditioning. I was also reminded that Charli XCX is a very young performer. She apologized repeatedly for the “rawness” of the set, which was totally unnecessary. Aside from a little flatting and the keys being subsumed by the drums, she sounded fine. She had a color-changing lightsaber mic stand and she shimmied and stomped and threw her hair around a lot. The crowd loved her, even if she didn’t quite ‘command’ them the way a more seasoned headliner might. She played every song I like from the record, plus a commandeered version of “I Love It” and the “I Want It That Way” encore, which was just about the most Millennial experience I could imagine.
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    Standing in a packed crowd at Glasslands last night with a Rolling Rock and a rapidly-developing grudge against the shoulder-bumping dude to our right, I was thankful for the air conditioning. I was also reminded that Charli XCX is a very young performer. She apologized repeatedly for the “rawness” of the set, which was totally unnecessary. Aside from a little flatting and the keys being subsumed by the drums, she sounded fine. She had a color-changing lightsaber mic stand and she shimmied and stomped and threw her hair around a lot. The crowd loved her, even if she didn’t quite ‘command’ them the way a more seasoned headliner might. She played every song I like from the record, plus a commandeered version of “I Love It” and the “I Want It That Way” encore, which was just about the most Millennial experience I could imagine.

    • Yahoo’s Mayer: we’re committed to monetizing Tumblr | VentureBeat

    johndarnielle:

    thecheesewillnotprotectyou:

    edwardspoonhands:

    johndarnielle:

    “Tumblr prides itself on being a home for brands, established and emerging, we at Yahoo are all about brands,” Mayer said on the call.

    not to be too too too cynical but I know all the people I follow on Tumblr and all the people who follow me are united in one thing and one thing only: their ravenous enthusiasm for brands. “I came for the sense of a new community, one with a keen feel for the visual but with a passion for language, too,” they say, “but it’s the brands that keep me here. Sweet Christ I love brands. Let the mountains collapse into dust and the oceans all boil, but give me brands,” they cry in the night. I personally remember, as a child, pleading with my parents to let me interface with my favorite brands. And interface we did. With the brands. The glorious, glorious brands

    I cried…but I’m not sure why.

    Just to play “Devil’s Advocate” here, I would like to point out that Tumblr is, in fact, all about brands. “Doctor Who” is a brand, “Disney Animation” is a brand, “Supernatural” “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” “Canon Digital Cameras” “Instagram” “Star Wars” “L’Oreal Hair Products”, hell even “Homestuck” are ALL brands. It’s just on Tumblr we call them “fandoms” instead.

    I cannot tell you how many products, shows, books, and other media I have consumed and loved in the last year, simply because I saw people excited about it on my dash.  We are all advertising and marketing these brands 36 hours a day, 8 days a week through GIFsets, meta posts, and snarky anon messages.

    As it stands now, Tumblr only barely (if that) breaks even on it’s operating costs, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that if we want this site to continue, it is going to have to start capitalizing on the fact that we are all DAMN good at selling stuff.

    David Karp (who is still CEO) has continually expressed an interest in ads that are “content in and of themselves” and Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo! to whom David directly reports) has said that she supports this view of advertising becoming as good as the content itself.

    I’ve seen a couple of things saying things to this effect, and I have to say, there isn’t much I disagree with more. No, just because there’s a thing you like a lot and it’s a thing doesn’t make it a brand. You can choose to think of the things you like as brands, if you like; that’s a discourse in which you can frame the world, if you like. I don’t, however, like. The Mountain Goats aren’t a brand; Thomas Malory’s not a brand; Joan Didion’s not a brand. I could conceive of them that way, if the ideology of branding were something in which I wanted to participate, but I think that calling the thing you love and are passionate about a “brand” is choosing to reduce the thing you love and are passionate about to its trappings; its externals; the parts about it that have almost nothing to do with what makes it special. Not everything is a brand, unless that’s the lens through which you choose to view the world. For the life of me, unless you stood to profit considerably from it, I cannot conceive of why one would choose to use this unpleasant lens. I’m not “advertising a brand” when I talk about music I enjoy, books I enjoy, food I like to cook. I’m sharing an experience with people who’re interested in knowing what my experiences are, who want to have a sort of dialogue with me, to meet out there in the amazing fertile field of music or literature, or cooking, even. To think of all this as “advertising a brand” is almost too depressing to bear. Yes, again: you can choose to think of it that way. Why on earth would you, though?

    On the prospect of “advertising being as good as the content itself” the less said the better: no thanks, forever.

    ♥ U, JD.